


(n.) a central nervous system stimulant of the methylxanthine class

by orphan_account



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coffee, Gen, Ghosts, M/M, Post-Avengers (2012), gratuitous butchering of the avengers mcu timeline, its not a coffee shop au if most of it takes place in tony starks kitchen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-24 01:00:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16170359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “Which one of you cretins took the entire pot of...oh, Barton. Of course. Having fun with your one-man comedy act?”“Your house is haunted,” declares Clint, staunchly ignoring the rather betrayed look the ghost flashes at him. “Make it stop.”Stark takes an involuntary step back. “Mywhoiswhat?”





	(n.) a central nervous system stimulant of the methylxanthine class

**Author's Note:**

> hello i have a large backlog of works for marvel so im very quietly unloading them :3  
> this particular fic is dedicated to meds from wh server, who came up with the prompt of winterhawk bonding over morning coffee. alas, it's drifted from the original idea to become a monster of an au. meds ily and im soRRY FOR MY HUBRIS LOL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint becomes a tenant and meets a tenant, not necessarily in that order.

Clint’s morning routine has gone to shit.

More often than not, the piercing Avengers siren blares its way across his struggling subconscious to remind him that he does actually have a day job (and that said day job definitely does _not_ involve falling asleep in Stark Tower’s vents while trying to hide the fact that he hasn’t slept properly in weeks.) Regardless, it’s become habit for him to stagger out of the ceiling on any day that doesn’t actively involve Hawkeye and skulk towards the communal kitchen in search of caffeine to jump-start his system. (Clint is not actually brave enough to seek out Tony Stark and inquire about the ingredients of _that_ particular hell brew, but upon mentioning this to JARVIS he discovers the next morning that the coffee machine by the kitchen window has started to dispense it specifically for him. Nice.)

Nobody quite understands Clint’s fixation on morning coffee aside Natasha, because Nat is the best, and one Thursday when it’s barely ten in the morning and they’ve all gone through the wringer she makes the executive decision of waltzing into SHIELD’s debrief precisely fifteen minutes late with a Starbucks cup. The other Avengers watch with varying degrees of interest as she hands the venti concoction off to Clint, who promptly downs the entire thing in one go.

“Shots, shots, shots,” chants Stark under his breath. Cap “accidentally” kicks him under the table, immediately escalating the underlying atmosphere of tense exhaustion into a full-blown spat between the duo until Fury decides he’s had enough of the frat house and requests that the team eject themselves from his office before he does so by force.

Clint is almost thankful. People yelling at each other in enclosed spaces is something that makes him edgy for reasons he’d prefer to never talk about. He declines the offer of transportation back to the Tower, instead choosing to take the hike back through Manhattan via the subway (which, sure, more enclosed spaces, but at least the only person he has to watch out for in this way is himself.)

This, too, is routine. Clint lets himself drift away in a piss-poor imitation of sleep as the E train speeds towards the World Trade Center while cataloguing exits in the back of his head and wondering just how much of a pain in the ass it would be to ally himself with Mole Man on the off chance he has to clear the subway without totally blowing his cover. Like this, he can almost believe he’s just another regular denizen of the city he’s made his home. Which, well. Clint’s only real superpower is the fact he hasn’t died yet, so it’s not too much of a stretch to pretend that Hawkeye is someone else’s superhero daydream and the Avengers are a fully-functional team without him.

 _Wouldn’t be the first time they functioned without you,_ whispers his traitorous subconscious, and Clint grits his teeth and forces himself to remember the entire chemical composition chain of caffeine instead of shit like _cold_ and _blue_ and _alone_. The remainder of the trip is unpleasant, to say the least, and the unwanted memories leave him fighting back a pretty solid wave of nausea as he jogs up the subway stairs to street level and slips past the conspiracy theorist trying to convince tourists that Iron Man is part of the Illuminati.

Of course, Clint knows better. Stark could legitimately run the Illuminati if he wanted to, but instead he chose the Avengers. No one is exactly sure what to think of that, least of all Clint himself, but his reliably-honed reflexes leave him subconsciously keeping tabs on the rest of the team from afar.

Banner is on eggshells, waiting for everyone to throw him out at the first sign of green. Thor is perhaps too enthusiastic about establishing friendships (however, considering this is most likely his first time experiencing prolonged social interactions with people who see him as _himself_ rather than King of Asgard, Clint considers this a forgivable offense.) Stark builds things to cope, emerging occasionally from his basement to retrieve caffeine and bitch at people. Natasha is dealing with the newness of a team that hasn’t been trained to stab her in the back by concealing herself from literally everyone, including Clint, and that hurts in new and horrible ways. Best of all, their fearlessly stupid leader is too busy trying to convince everyone else that he’s okay to notice that he’s falling apart at the seams just as badly.

And Clint—

—is surviving, because that’s what he does. Cups of cryptid caffeine brew and too-frequent doses of naproxen and patching himself up on the fire escape after missions because like hell is he going to SHIELD medical, they’ll have him under observation for suicidal ideation quicker than he could say “therapy”, and it’s working just fine for him up until he hauls himself up the side of the Tower and watches a whole person flicker into existence next to the coffee pot.

 

* * *

 

“No,” declares Clint emphatically, swinging one leg back over the windowsill, “nope, no, absolutely not. I do not get paid enough to deal with this. I will _never_ get paid enough to deal with this, not even if I was Stark himself. No. Oh my god, wait, what did you do to JARVIS—”

“Who’s JARVIS,” rasps the ghost, and Clint freezes with a leg out the window as he shifts his priority from _get the hell out of here_ to _get this ghost the hell out of here._ Regardless of what he thinks about the other people in this house, they’re still his teammates (friends, maybe, if he ever lets his guard down) and he’s honor-bound to defend their collective living space in the absence of anyone else to do it. He’ll be damned if the only thing he does for them is to actively try to throw himself out a window because of a _haunting._

“Disembodied voice coming from the ceiling? Your friendly neighborhood eye in the sky?” Clint hauls himself back into the kitchen and snags the entire pot of coffee, cradling it to his chest like a newborn. The ghost stares at him like he’s grown a second head, which is ironic because Clint isn’t the one floating several inches off the floor and fading around the edges.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the amazing Hawkeye,” says Clint with a flippancy he doesn’t feel. “Give the kitchen its power back or risk Stark finding and braining you for daring to hurt his baby, which is honestly not my problem. You got a name?”

“My name is…” The ghost looks up, meets Clint’s eyes first in confusion and then in panic. Several lights flicker around them. “I don’t...have a name?”

Clint shrugs and begins ingesting caffeine straight from the pot. “Better start thinking, buddy. Copyright’s a bitch, and someone already got dibs on Ghost.” Privately, he hopes that she’s doing better than he is at the moment. SHIELD likes to give people choices wrapped in the threat of _your life or theirs_ , and for someone with superpowers that are killing them, that isn’t really a choice.

“I...I’m,” blurts the ghost, floating backwards, “I have to go,” and promptly winks out of existence. Every single electronic device in the kitchen activates in its wake.

Clint takes a seat on the windowsill with his coffee and watches as JARVIS sets about acerbically recalibrating things while expressing a bitter distaste for all things supernatural, but for once, he can’t bring himself to agree.

 

* * *

 

_(This guy...Why do I feel like I’ve seen him before?)_

 

* * *

 

The nameless ghost reappears several times over the course of the next week. Clint appears to be the only one who can see it, which irritates him beyond belief.

“Can you _please_ find someone else to bother?” hisses Clint one morning, after he’s consumed his necessary pot of coffee and checked to make sure nobody can witness him talking to thin air. “Like, dude. I am literally begging you. The stress of waking up in a vent and seeing something glowing at me from a foot away is giving me hives.”

“I can’t,” snaps the ghost, looking rather miserable. “There’s a barrier.”

“A barrier,” says Clint incredulously. By the end of this conversation, he will most likely have aged ten years. “Let me guess, it’s blocking you from moving on, too?”

“Moving on?” The ghost narrows its eyes. “The fuck? Just ‘coz I’m here don’t mean I’m dead.”

“You are literally phasing through the floor as we speak,” yells Clint.

Of course, this is the exact moment Tony Stark decides to poke his obnoxiously large head into the living room. “Which one of you cretins took the entire pot of...oh, Barton. Of course. Having fun with your one-man comedy act?”

“Your house is haunted,” declares Clint, staunchly ignoring the rather betrayed look that the ghost flashes at him. “Make it stop.”

Stark takes an involuntary step back. “My _who_ is _what?”_

“The Tower. It’s haunted.” Clint scowls and crosses his arms, stubbornly resisting the maddening urge to stomp a foot. “Try threatening to build a Faraday cage around the coffee machine.”

“I don’t at all understand, but sure.” The engineer throws his hands into the air. “If building you a giant ghost protector will stop you from doing a constant Old Man Yells At Cloud impression—”

Every single light in the room turns itself off simultaneously. Stark stares at Clint, eyes wide.

“Told you,” mutters Clint stubbornly. He notes with no small amount of trepidation that the ghost has also vanished, and the walls of the kitchen are beginning to take on an eerie glow. “Shouldn’t we do something about this?”

“Oh, absolutely,” replies his fellow Avenger, already dragging Clint out of the kitchen by his wrist. “We run.”

 

* * *

 

There are some things you simply cannot do together without becoming slightly better friends with a person, and running from a ghost in your own house is one of them. Stark becomes Tony in Clint’s head, which is only slightly less weird than fleeing from the ghost who consistently continues to insist it’s not a ghost, and he resolves to actually attend tonight’s team movie night; with any luck, Natasha won't be too mad at him for hiding from his problems when she notices him making a proper appearance in front of his teammates for the first time in a month.

Of course, because Clint’s life is just Like That, none of the above actually happens. Conversely, what _does_  happen is that the ghost yells for them to _stop running away, seriously, I need your help,_ except its voice is in Clint’s mind and not his ears (not like it would’ve helped any, considering the bright purple hearing aids he sports on a daily, but it would have been super nice to get a warning before someone _else_ took jabs at his brain, and, yep. There goes the acute stress response. Awesome.)

Considering Clint barely has the time to register the faint sensation of alarm that most definitely isn't his before he sways on his feet and passes out completely, he really hopes Nat can give him a pass for this one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i plan to update every week or so *knocks on wood for luck*  
> edit: lol i forgot half the first chapter we really out here


End file.
